Ron Rash set his lead story in the collection Something Rich and Strange during the Great Depression.įrom these stories – and many others – literary fiction had taken on new depths, creating a brand-new sub-genre: the deeply researched historical short story.ġ. Ethan Rutherford published The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, with its title effort a fictional retelling of the Confederate soldiers who pilot the first military submarine, the H.L. Jim Shepard, a writer primarily known for his short fiction, produced a series of research-inspired stories, the best-known of which is “Love and Hydrogen.” Anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2002 and later the title story in one of Shepard’s collections, “Love and Hydrogen” presents a love story between two crewmembers of the Hindenburg on its final, tragic voyage, the narrative drama unfolding amidst a historically accurate and realistic setting. The New York Times praised the collection for its “considerable research” and stated that its “overall effect is quietly dazzling.” Later that year, the book won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction, beating out such luminaries as Steven Millhauser and Ron Hansen.įrom there, a small literary movement was started.īarrett was soon joined by other writers who consciously mixed heavy long-form research with the concision and directness of a short story. The title effort in this collection relates the experience of Lauchlin Grant, a Canadian doctor who ministers to Irish immigrants afflicted with typhus during the great famine of the 1840s. By 2003, a small group of literary writers were consciously trying to incorporate elements of the research-based historical novel into the short story.Īt the forefront of this movement was Andrea Barrett, author of the collection Ship Fever that presented stories largely set in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Works such as these not only required a tremendous level of narrative skill but also significant research abilities. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden presented the first-person account of a young woman living in midcentury Kyoto with such authority many reviewers wondered how a male American writer could so effectively cross gender and cultural divides.
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